Today was a much better day for Abi. Her school is having sprit week and today was skittle day. Everyone was to dress in bright colors (like skittles) and Abi was dressed in bright pink (imagine that) from head to toe. She got out of school at 11:30 today and was very happy. She wanted to go to the “underground” shopping area and look for a new handbag and watch. The “underground” is a little weird and funny at the same time. As soon as you approach the subway area several people come to you and want to show you the “market”. So….you follow them to the “market” which is a bunch of small shops in a shopping mall. These shops are unique because they all have secret doors that lead to another room that is twice the size of the store front. Today we discovered that there is yet another layer to these stores. In one of the shops they actually dismantled a display, removed part of the shelving, slide the wall back and revealed the “back back” room. We had to duck under part of the shelving to get into this room. If you can get over the creepy factor it is really very funny.

Many people on the Concordia staff are from the Pacific Northwest and we visited with one of them today that has a home in Depot Bay, Oregon. She was very helpful and told us many things about transitioning to a new culture. She said most people experience a “sensory overload” and their brains just shut down for a little while. By “shut down” I mean it moves slower and you just can’t process things as fast. The good news is that this is temporary. I thought this was very interesting and it gives me a great excuse to have a “slow brain” for a while.

Tonight we had dinner at a Japanese restaurant. The food was very good and the service was really fun. We had 5 girls waiting on our table and they were so cute and funny. They hovered around our table the entire time we were in the restaurant. During dinner we were trying to get Abi’s new cell phone to turn on. So…our waitresses all wanted to help us figure out how to turn on Abi’s phone. They were so cute all huddled around the phone, all talking to us at the same time both in Chinese and a little bit of English. They were laughing and talking and laughing and talking. Finally Abi figured out how to turn on the phone and they all cheered. We were all laughing so hard other people were starting to stare. We took a picture of two of the girls with Abi and her phone and they made the Asian sign with their fingers as we took the pictures. That made us start laughing all over again.

Tim has to go to work tomorrow…so I am going to be on my own for coffee. My big job for tomorrow is to sit at our new apartment while the “IT” guys connect our wireless internet and wait for some plants to be delivered. I purchase two five foot topiaries from a man that sells plants out of a basket on the back of his bicycle. The topiaries are potted in very nice black clay pots and cost 300RMB for both plants. That is about $36. You just have to love shopping in China!!!!